How to breathe new life into old, beloved PC games? Put ray tracing into it, of course! After Quake 2 and Portal, the next PC game to get the ray tracing treatment is none other than one of the best PC games of all time, Half-Life 2 (HL2) by Valve.
Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project is being developed by a team of four HL2’s top modders, now working together under the banner of Orbifold Studios, according to Nvidia.
Using Nvidia’s RTX Remix modding platform, the modders are rebuilding materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties, adding extra geometric detail via Valve’s Hammer editor, and leveraging Nvidia’s technologies including full ray tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex, and RTX IO to breathe new life into the venerable game.
Nvidia said almost every asset is being reconstructed in high fidelity, and full ray tracing (also known as path tracing) is being leveraged to bring cutting-edge graphics to HL2.
With ray tracing, you get realistic shadows, lighting, ambient occlusions, reflections, etc., so you end up with a more realistic-looking game. Path tracing is the next step up, which seeks to emulate how lights work in the real world and applies that to the game. It’s also significantly more taxing on the GPU, but the end result is astonishing.
We know that you want to play HL2 in path tracing right now. But, this project is in its initial stages of development. This endeavour is a collaborative initiative within the community, aiming to inspire skilled modders and artists from all around.
If you are interested in joining the project, and have significant experience with creating mods or 3D art, you can apply via the Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project website.
